SUBURBAN SPRAWL

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SUBURBAN SPRAWL
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What Causes it?

• White flight
• Technology
• Government subsidizes
• Space/Land/Entropy
• Personal Preferences
• Government Policies
• Media

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Americas enduring romance with the automobile

• From the dawn of the automobile age, government
  has provided the right of way for cars, trucks,
  and buses, investing billions of dollars in
  highways, streets, traffic controls, and other
  essential infrastructure

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• There is tremendous political appeal of the
  automobile, derived primarily from the
  enhancement of personal mobility and freedom of
  movement.

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• There is a critical interplay between automotive
  transport and urban development that created the
  sprawling low-density contemporary metropolis, an
  urban form utterly dependent on automobile and
  highway serving a population that resists efforts
  to limit freedom of movement or increase the
  costs of automotive use.

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• Perhaps critics overestimate the dangers of
  sprawling urban development and global warming
  they often promote expensive and inefficient rail
  transit schemes and they propose land use and
  travel regulations that are antithetical to the
  American ideals of freedom and mobility.

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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (suburbs)

• Avila discusses the physical and cultural
  boundaries that distinguish white space from
  black space
• Does this distinction still exist today?
• San Fernando Valley example

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• Perhaps the culture of white flight is over
• White institutions are now becoming diversified
• Sports
• Media
• Walt Disney Mulan, Pocahontas
• Avila - Growing frustration with the freeway and
  the automobile. The age of the freeway maybe
  passing

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What to do about sprawl?

• Nothing? as population grows people will fill
  out the surrounding area. First with low density
  building but later with higher density (edge
  cities)

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Calthorpe and Fulton

• Planning (designing)
• Whole systems approach
• the real illusionis that we cannot control the
  form of our communities.
• the problem is not that our suburbs and cities
  are lacking design but that they are designed
  according to failed principles with flawed
  implementation.

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• What are the failed principles?
• Specialization
• Standardization
• Mass Production

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• Specialization meant that each land
  use-residential, retail, commercial, or civic-was
  isolated and developed in isolation without any
  responsibility for the whole.
• Standardization refers the one size fits all
  mentality.
• Mass production the logic of mass production
  moves relentlessly toward ever-increasing scales,
  which in turn reinforces the specialization and
  standardization.

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Is sprawl that bad?

• People uniformly long for an architecture that
  puts detail and identity back into what have too
  often become generic, if functional, buildings.
• Siegel But sprawl brings enormous benefits and
  is in part an expression of the new high-tech
  economy whose campus-like office parks on the
  periphery of urban areas have driven the economic
  boom.

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• Rising income and employment, combined with
  declining interest rates, have allowed a record
  number of people (including minorities) to
  purchase homes for the first time, reflecting
  upward mobility for the aspiring lower middle
  class
• Suburban growth can also help the central city.
  In the Philadelphia area, economic growth in the
  surrounding area helped offset the job losses in
  the city by creating new industries. 20 percent
  of the city residents commute to the suburbs.

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Hayden New Urbanism (planned sprawl)

• No more housing subdivisions
• No more shopping centers
• No more office parks
• Solution new suburban neighborhood with a master
  plan, tight building codes, narrow streets,
  attractive public places, and dedicated open
  spaces.

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• Seaside, Florida
• Extended porch-sitting
• Leisurely strolling
• sidewalks!!!!!
• No lawns?
• Small lots
• High density
• HOA
• 300 houses and few full-time residents